Thursday, 5 November 2015

We’ve noticed you're a good customer. If that continues, we will soon have to unsubscribe you.

On Friday the 1st I made a shopping list. Saturday the 2nd I loaded some tempting offers on one of my loyalty cards. On Sunday the 3rd I went on a spree and purchased 125 dollars of Health & Beauty Aids. Creams. Lotions. Ointments. Products that make your dull hair shiny. Products that make you shiny skin dull. Stuff that I needed. Because I had carefully chosen the promotional offer that suited my needs, I was rewarded with over 18,000 bonus points. Nice.

On Monday the 4th I went to pick up something at the post office of that same store. And I remembered I needed some bar soap. Cha-ching, another 120 points. Here, I thought, was a merchant who really gets it. I'm spending money I usually spend at other retailers here, at this store, because of the rewards. And, frankly – d'uh. That's how a loyalty program works.

So imagine my surprise later this week when I got home and opened this email:

“Are you still there?Hello!We’ve noticed you haven't opened our emails in a while. If there continues to be no activity, we will soon have to unsubscribe your email address.”

I was going to be fired as a customer. For using my loyalty card to buy hundreds of dollars of merchandise at their store!

How can they have created a stack where, even though I am loading offers on my phone from my emails into their app, and buying products on both a promotional-driven and a daily needs basis, there is some feed that cannot see any of those transactions and decides to fire me as a customer?

This is a retailer whose marketing department is staffed by people who are not in the first quartile of any cohort.

The moral of the story is “watch your stack”. Don't pull a data feed of customers to fire without parsing a feed that shows you customers that have just purchased. In fact, better yet – don't fire your customers using a loyalty program.

BTW worst of all, the only way to re-enroll in the program is to follow phishing-scam style links to dodgy login pages. Priceless.

And PPS. Of course I can't send them an email capturing the above information. Their loyalty campaign emails are do-not-reply.